


latrodectus

by besselfcn



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amelie And Widowmaker Are Different People, Body Horror, Domestic, F/F, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 03:39:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21229175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Widowmaker’s dreams are muted shades of hazy purple and grey; Amelie dreams in technicolor. Widowmaker dreams of ideas, and things, and feelings; Amelie dreams of events. People. Places.Widowmaker’s dreams are softer, like a fairytale spun out on a web.Amelie has nightmares, lurid and screaming.





	latrodectus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [madburnish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madburnish/gifts).

> I had so much fun writing this for Oak! I hope you enjoy!

Amélie dreams of eight perfect, pointed legs, unfurling from their carapace and spiraling outward from her chest. In these dreams she splits open along these jagged seams, her bones cracking into shards of exoskeleton, her eyes bulging and splitting into four and ten and twenty, spreading exponentially over the expanse of her skin, turned cold and hard and purple-black.   


Then Widowmaker wakes up, and Amélie recedes. Slips back into the quiet, darkened corners of their mind, and takes her dreams back with her.   


“How did you sleep, darling?” Sombra asks, her fingers tapping across the prominent edges of Widowmaker’s ribcage where it shines through against her chest.

“Fine,” Widowmaker shrugs, and she rolls out of bed. “Is there coffee on?”

“Not yet,” Sombra says, and yawns. She taps at something on the tablet always attached at her side. “Now there is.”

Widowmaker scoffs a laugh. She descends the stairs, two at a time.   


*

When Talon fell, known associates Amélie Lacroix and Olivia Colomar were unable to be located, and have since been presumed dead.   


Widowmaker knows--and suspects Sombra knows--that Reyes could have tracked them down. Should have tracked them down. They were not quiet when they left, and giving them up could have bolstered Reyes’s immunity deal when he could use all the help he could get.   


But Amélie remembers the man. His sentiments. His sense of what was fair.

He got a second chance. It’s all he can do to give them the same.

*

In a terracotta-tiled kitchen with arched windows that overlook the rolling Spanish countryside, Widowmaker makes her breakfast: orange marmalade spread over burnt sourdough toast.

She doesn’t taste it; she doesn’t taste much of anything. Maybe a hint of heat from chili peppers, or the sharpened point of acid in a lemon. But stripping the blood from her body, the warmth from her tongue--whether they intended to or not--peeled away any semblance of finer sensation from her tastebuds long ago.   


The toast and jam has an interesting texture, though. She thinks that’s nice.   


She’s finishing a second piece when Sombra comes downstairs, finally. Her hair is a mess, her oversized nightshirt hanging down to her knees. Not that that’s hard. Her knees and her shoulders are rather close together, compared to the average person.

“What are you smiling at?” Sombra asks, eyes narrowing in suspicion.   


Widowmaker shrugs. “Nothing,” she says. “Well, not much.”

“Oh, ha-ha,” Sombra says. Widowmaker takes a step out of the way to let her get at the clattering pots and pans in the cupboard below. “Sombra’s short, a funny joke. Get some new material, honey, I beg of you.”

“I said nothing,” Widowmaker reminds her.   


“Your eyes say it all,  _ arañita. _ ”

Widowmaker blinks slowly. Just two eyes; she can feel the eyelids slip down, back up. She watches Sombra crack an two eggs into a pan. It’s too cold; they’ll stick; she never learns.

“Did you have a bad dream?” Sombra asks, without looking at her. “You were moving, in your sleep.”

Widowmaker wants another piece of toast. They’re sharp, when they crumble in her mouth. “Amélie did,” she explains.   


Sombra nods. “Ah, fuck,” she sighs, scraping at the egg white sealed onto the pan. “Every god damn time.”

When she’s scraped what remains of her eggs onto a plate, she turns back to Widowmaker. “How do you know?” she asks, between mouthfuls.

“How do I know what,” Widowmaker answers. She knows. She watches the way the wind twists through the grass outside beyond the terrace.   


“How do you know when it’s Amélie dreaming,” Sombra pushes, like she always pushes.

Widowmaker turns to her. She pulls the bread down from the shelf again to make another piece.   


“Amélie feels afraid."

*

Sombra seems never to run out of questions like this. Since she started hearing about the way Widowmaker spoke of Amélie--when providing background on Overwatch, when scouting places she’d been before, when speaking to Reyes about things he claimed he wanted to know but was enraged to find out--she’d had questions that she never seemed satisfied to have the answers to.

“You talk about her like she’s someone else,” she’d asked once--not an accusation, exactly, but nearly there.   


Widowmaker had furrowed her brow. “She is.”

“She’s not, though,” Sombra had insisted. “She’s you. She used to be, anyway.”

And Widowmaker had shaken her head, convinced finally that Sombra would not understand.

“She’s dead,” she’d told her, and left it at that.

*

Amélie’s dreams are different in other ways, too.

Widowmaker’s dreams are muted shades of hazy purple and grey; Amélie dreams in technicolor. Widowmaker dreams of ideas, and things, and feelings; Amélie dreams of events. People. Places.   


Widowmaker’s dreams are softer, like a fairytale spun out on a web.

Amélie has nightmares, lurid and screaming.

She dreams of the things the scientists did; she dreams of being pulled apart. She dreams of spiders that crawl down her throat and chew her to pieces from the inside out. She dreams of Gerard, and slitting his throat. She dreams of him slitting hers, and the two of them becoming monsters together, and Talon burning like an effigy.   


There is none of that anger in Amélie, when Widowmaker is awake. None of that pain and hatred. She doesn’t think it is hiding; just further away. A memory of grief that doesn’t feel so acute in the hazy morning light.   


*

“What do you mean, she’s dead?” Sombra had asked, a week later. It’d been eating at her; Widowmaker could tell. “I hear you talk about  _ oh Amélie says this _ , or  _ Amélie remembers that _ . If she’s dead, how do you know what she thinks?”

It isn’t common for Widowmaker to be angry; these questions make her angry. They are unnecessary. They are prying for the sake of prying.

That is, she supposes, Sombra’s job.

“I remember her,” Widowmaker says, “and I know what she thinks, even now. When it is something she cares about.”

_ She doesn’t care very much about you _ , she almost adds, but bites her tongue.

“Then she isn’t dead,” Sombra says, as if she’s won something.

“She has no body,” Widowmaker snaps. “She has no mouth to speak and no eyes to see. She cannot touch this world, no matter what she feels or thinks. Once in a while I hear a memory of what she might have thought or done, if she were here. That is not life. She is not alive.”

Sombra had gone quiet, then. Her face looked almost like it was in pain, but that seemed such a nonsensical thing to feel.

*

The sun is warm, where it streams heavy through the windows. Sometimes Amélie stretches herself out there on the carpet beside the little seven-kilogram monster that Sombra calls a cat.   


If she lays there long enough, her skin starts to feel warm to the touch, like a rock soaked in heat. If it’s warm enough, the way Sombra kisses her neck feels different. Feels deeper.

“Come here,” Widowmaker requests, and Sombra looks up from her laptop and laughs.

“Okay,” she says, and bounds across the couch and the ottoman to the open expanse of the floor, slips her fingers down Widowmaker’s arms to tangle with her fingertips.   


*

She thinks sometimes Sombra would not like Amélie very much.

The thought makes her--not sad. Sadness is complex, and difficult to hold. But it makes her feel indignant, perhaps. Disappointed.

Sombra would think of Amélie as weak, and vapid. A rich girl who could not be bothered to step outside her castle while the world burned around her. Maybe sometimes she played those things. Maybe she played them quite well.   


But it was never Widowmaker who underwent the things the scientists did. It was never Widowmaker who fought them, kicked and screamed so that they had to take, and take, and take, until all that was left was a body with a heartbeat like the slow swing of a pendulum and a mouth that no longer remembered the taste of sugar. It was never Widowmaker who asked, even after all that, even after the girl living in her body had killed her husband, if she’d please take them both to see him for Christmas.   


Amélie fought. It shouldn’t matter that she didn’t win.   


*

“Maybe she’s not dead,” Sombra had whispered, after that first time Widowmaker woke up from one of her nightmares in Sombra’s arms. “I know,” she’d said quickly, “I know she’s not alive. But I don’t know if that means she has to be dead.”

Widowmaker was ready to snap at her again, to leave and not come back; cut ties like so many silk strings.   


But something in her chest and twinged, and she had stayed.

“What is she, then?” she had asked, her figertips running over the smooth buzzed side of Sombra’s hair.   


“I don’t know,” Sombra admitted. “A ghost.” And then she winked. “A shadow.”

Widowmaker had breathed. In, and out. She never seemed to quite catch her breath, anymore.

In the spaces left inside her chest, Amélie had taken root.

“A shadow,” she had repeated.

Sombra had nodded, and slid her leg over Widowmaker’s body, shivering where her skin met cold flesh.

“Alright,” Widowmaker had said. “Alright. A shadow, then.”

Sombra had laughed, and Widowmaker had let herself be swallowed up, then, for just a moment, from the inside out.    
  


**Author's Note:**

> their cat's name is Schrodinger


End file.
